On Thursday, Paul talked about Correctly Rounded Transcendental
Functions & Arbitrary Precision. The test for correct rounding
in the fast case can be done with one FMA. MPFR was developed
at LORIA. He urges us to adopt both transcendentals & arbitrary
precision (as well as arbitrary precision transcendentals). We
have already done so, at least in part & optionally.

We took our 3:00 break more or less on time.

After the break we began with the new IEEE operating rules.
There were sufficient objections to details that it was felt
that it needed editing before we consider it again. Jeff will
head a PnP subcommittee together with Jim & Mike to edit the
rules for presentation at the January meeting.

The Decimal Issue. Dave wanted to know if there had been any
progress in the past few months. There has been a compromise
proposed & Jeff & Mike are charged with writing it up for us.
(All fields same width & significand different format) Dave
pointed out that there is a third party on this issue, the
users. Nobuyoshi supported the opinion that the users want
only one format citing endianness as an example of a needless
variation. He also supports database applications for which
he already has a format & in which only comparison is needed.
(Mike said there exists a decimal implementation in gcc.)
Nobu said SAP supports Java, ABAP (an SAP language), & Cobol.
While many people in the room agreed with his conclusion in
principle, some felt his arguments lacked demonstrable support.

Numerical Debugging Horror Stories by Prof Kahan. We ran too
long to get to this but we will put it on the January agenda.